webcontainer-core

I find this technology story a bit weird. Afaict stackblitz is based on WebContainer™ which has a "working group" and is supported in Chrome/Edge so far: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core But the FAQ says: Is there a developer API? Not yet. Once we reach General Availability for WebContainer we plan to release an API surface. Is this open source? Today no, but the API will be open source to developers at GA. The closest I can find from Stackblitz is this Github issue where the Stackblitz founder 4 years ago responds to "By any chance, are you open-sourcing the codebase?" with: Definitely! We're planning on open sourcing the core tech behind stackblitz (which is what this repo is for), but there's a lot that needs to happen between now & then. I'm going to fill out the readme a bit which should answer this in detail — will c

Quoting https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core: > We're limited by the browser's ability to make network requests, so connecting to processes like MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc. are not currently possible

node.js, as any other native Linux/Windows/Mac application, talks to the OS via a system API. You can emulate that API using WASM, mapping I/O to browser APIs, which is why they mention network is implemented via service workers, for example. File I/O can be mapped to IndexDB... Threads can also be mapped to service workers, I guess... and so on. emscripten[1] did this a long time ago for C, which is how a bunch of native applications have already been ported to run on the browser. webcontainers[2] seem to do a similar thing but focused on exposing the browser API to the native apps in a way that integrates well with the JS environment. [1] https://emscripten.org/ [2] https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core

Great question :) We have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk

Great questions- we have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk

We'll be open sourcing core parts of WebContainer as we move towards GA. We have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk